Fethiye Photo: Pomegranate – The Ultimate Turkish Seasonal Food?

We love this time of year in Fethiye. Summer is a time for enjoying days and evenings with friends and family who fly over from the UK; day trips, pool days, bars, eating out. A lot of the time, it whirls by in a haze…and then all of a sudden, it’s gone. We wave off the last of our visitors, the weather breaks and there’s no more rushing about to be done.

This is the time of year where we think about trekking to Kayaköy, and other places, in pleasant temperatures. It’s the time of year where we stroll along an almost deserted Çalış Beach in the early afternoon – sometimes we’ll stroll straight back home, and other times, we’ll stop for a drink to enjoy the autumn Çalış sunset. It doesn’t matter, the time is ours to do with as we will.

This is also the time of year when we see the appearance of our favourite seasonal foods in Turkey. One of those is the pomegranate (nar).

October – A pomegranate ripens on a tree in Çalış

Throughout our busy summer, pomegranate trees have been quietly blooming, miraculously producing their fruits from the fiery orange blossom (see this post about pomegranate trees in Kayaköy). Now, we’re at the end of October and when we go to Fethiye market on Tuesday, fruit stalls will be packed with huge, juicy pomegranates – and this year, we’ll know exactly which ones we’re looking for.

Many of the stalls will have one or two of their pomegranates torn open just so the customers can see the fruit inside. After learning a couple of years ago that there are in fact two types of pomegranate, sweet and sour, we’ll be hunting out the garnet-coloured fruits of the ekşili (sour) pomegranate.

And, we did say that at this time of year, the pomegranate is one ofour favourite seasonal foods in Turkey. The other is of the live variety. If you’re in Istanbul at the moment, please go along to the Karaköy fish market and eat lots of deep-fried hamsi for us. We’re not going to make it up there this year and we’re trying our best not to think about it!

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Comments

i just love pomegranates! i couldn’t wait for them to show up at the green grocers when i was a little kid. we called them indian apples. this is the first time i have seen a pomegranate tree and the blossoms…beautiful!

I love the pomegranate trees when they are laden with fruit. It is such a beautiful fruit to sprinkle over salads, hummus dishes and anything that takes your fancy! Pomegranate ice cream sounds brilliant

@ BacktoBodrum: The sweet ones are the very pale, almost colourless, pink ones and the sour ones are really dark. İf you click the link, it takes you to a post we wrote about it a couple of years backand there are pics of them. 🙂

My favorite is to drink a big glass of juice made of fresh pressed orange juice with fresh pressed pomegranate, half-half or yarim-yarim in turkish. I usually get it at the market-bazar with a spinach-cheese gozleme, its paradise in my mouth!Suzanne

@ Andrew Graeme Gould: We work hard to make it as idyllic as possible – by not taking the abundance of pomegranates for granted, for example. 🙂 Never heard of custard apples and we get mangoes here but they’re imported.

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